Welcome

This blog, mostly photographs with little text, is a record of another year in the life of our garden. For the derivation of the title 'Insnared with Flowers' (original spelling) click here.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Parasites....

Bee-flies are ceaseless fliers but this one paused on the fence to clean its proboscis for just long enough for me to take a picture. That long proboscis looks dangerous but it's just for sucking nectar from flowers. The real menace from this insect comes from its habit of laying eggs in the nests of mining bees, where the bee-fly larva uses its host's pollen food store for its own development.

This is a little solitary bee in the genus Nomada, extracting nectar from my forget-me-nots. Nomada is a parasite of other bee species, breeding like a cuckoo in the nests of mining bees.